


Embroidery

by bomberqueen17



Series: Meet Death Sitting [15]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alchemy, Ancient Sea missing scenes, Gen, Kaer Morhen, Lambert and Jaskier are gender non-conforming bros, Teaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:35:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27436687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: This is more or less several missing scenes from right around chapter 16 of The Ancient Sea, laying to rest a few loose ends I'd been meaning to address.Also, the final punchline, from Jaskier's POV, to the weirdness about Witcher teeth that, if we extend our memories back to the beforetimes, is what really started my weird journey into Witcher fanfic.(Which makes this sound like an ending, which really, it's not. If you want more nonbinary Lambert, that's a large part of the Lambert/Keira thing I'm also working on.)
Series: Meet Death Sitting [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639717
Comments: 49
Kudos: 278





	Embroidery

**Author's Note:**

> No particular warnings; there's a discussion of the pogrom at Kaer Morhen, but it's not graphic. There's also disussion of being gender non-conforming, but it's low-stakes and friendly, for the most part.

_These are some interstices of Ancient Sea that I didn’t get around to concurrently with the rest, and now feel I must. So, enjoy._

The library at Kaer Morhen was… not what Jaskier had hoped. Perhaps it should have been what he expected. It was a largish room, but only one room, with a high sturdy ceiling and good sturdy bright windows, but it seemed sort of carved out of a hallway. It was narrow, with a big battered heavy oak table near the window, and the wall lined with bookshelves, and a few other shelves extending off into the darker parts of the room. 

But the selection of books was not large, and a lot of the shelves were empty. Most of what was there were books, predictably, about monsters. There was also a surprising quantity of books on swords, swordsmanship, sword manuals, sword maintenance. And a fairly big chunk of dry-looking books on political history of various kingdoms, chronicles of the names of nobles and such. He wouldn’t have thought they’d care.

Geralt had more books in his personal room than this, which Jaskier really hadn’t expected.

He’d sort of been hoping that an ancient fortress in remote mountains would have ancient books, unknown in other collections, that sort of thing. And he knew the assumption many people made, that Witchers weren’t big intellectuals, but he knew that wasn’t true; Geralt read and wrote a lot, and had never once passed up picking up a book in Jaskier’s presence-- he tended to collect things he found, and while sometimes he’d pass on yet another broken rake or blackjack, he never passed up a book, no matter how dull. 

Of course it was because books were expensive and junk dealers would pay for them even if they were stupid books, but Jaskier had also witnessed how seldom the books were the thing Geralt chose to sell on. He’d also caught the man completely absorbed in reading some unpromising, boring-looking book several times. Maybe it had been foolish of him to extrapolate that to other Witchers, though. Maybe the others didn’t like books as much. 

He poked through the shelves anyway, noticing that a number of the books showed damage-- either singed edges, or torn covers. The damage had been inexpertly repaired. He supposed it was too much to expect them to have had a librarian either.

Ciri was at the table, having settled in with a practiced ease to the task of copying over a section of a treatise on monsters. The treatise, fascinatingly, was hand-written, and Jaskier rather thought it was in Geralt’s handwriting. 

* * *

“So,” Jaskier said, over lunch. “The library.”

Geralt looked up, frowning, then his mouth tightened and he looked down. That was interesting. “What?” Jaskier asked.

“Such as it is,” Geralt said, a bit grimly. 

Jaskier blinked at him. “What?”

“We _had_ a library,” Geralt said. 

Ciri looked up from her single-minded dedication to the food for long enough to say, “I like the library,” a bit bewilderedly. (She’d spent three hours doing sword drills with Vesemir, so she was understandably hungry. Jaskier was hungry just from having watched about ten minutes of it.)

“That’s a hallway,” Geralt said, “that we put some bookshelves in. The library was burned.”

“Burned,” Ciri said. Jaskier felt it as a concrete pain in his chest, and had to put his spoon down for a moment to swallow it down. 

“The pogrom,” he said quietly. 

“They burned the library,” Geralt said. “I don’t think they managed to steal any of the books. The mages that led it probably wanted them, but-- the librarian wouldn’t--” He paused, looked away for a moment. 

Vesemir, a little ways down the bench, said, “Anatus only had one leg, but he was no less fierce a fighter for that. They had to go through him to get the library, and it took them so much to kill him there wasn’t much left by the time they got in.”

Ciri looked back and forth between them, surprised enough to stop eating for a moment. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“The reason this keep is a ruin,” Geralt said, “is that a group of mages got together a mob to destroy it and kill everyone inside.”

Ciri sat in perfect stillness for a moment, mouth open, and then closed her mouth and said, grimly, “How long ago?”

Geralt and Vesemir traded glances, then looked at Eskel. “Fifty years, give or take,” Eskel said.

Lambert sat down next to Eskel, and Coen next to him; they’d been doing the cooking, so they were out last with the food. “What are we-- oh,” Lambert said. There was a quiet moment. “Forty-eight,” he said, finally.

“A handful of us hadn’t come back for the winter,” Geralt said. 

“I was the only survivor,” Vesemir said quietly, “of the people who were here-- the instructors, the full-grown Witchers home for winter, and the.” He paused, breathed, and said, “The children.” There was silence for another moment, and he said, “They cut me down first, and then the-- my students-- piled on--” 

It wasn’t, Jaskier thought, that Vesemir was going to _cry_ , exactly. But his face had gone very still, the lines in it much more deeply graven than normal. “So the attackers couldn’t tell you were still alive,” Jaskier said quietly, for him. Vesemir nodded, a tiny movement of his head. 

“The news came to us, out in the world,” Geralt said. “I’d overwintered in Aedirn, and Eskel in Temeria, and we raced there as fast as we could, as soon as we heard, and I caught up to Eskel at the pass. It had been several weeks but there were still fires burning.”

“I didn’t hear _shit_ ,” Lambert said bitterly. “I didn’t know until the next autumn.”

“I had to dig myself out of the pile of bodies,” Vesemir said, “and put myself back together, and try to put out the fires, and search for survivors.” He was looking at his hands, and shook his head, another tiny gesture. 

Coen took a shaky breath, and Jaskier glanced over at him and saw that the Griffin witcher was looking away, jaw tight. 

“What happened to Kaer Seren was similar,” Vesemir said, “and far more recent.”

“Kaer Seren?” Ciri asked.

“The home keep of the School of the Griffin,” Vesemir said. 

“Mages caused an avalanche,” Coen said tightly. 

Vesemir looked at Ciri. “It’s always mages,” he said. “I’m not saying that mages always intend us harm, but it’s the case that if anyone wants to harm us, they need mages to do it.”

Ciri looked at him for a long moment, and Jaskier could tell, then, that she was a descendent of Calanthe. “Understood,” she said. 

* * *

Jaskier eyed Lambert warily. The Witcher was between him and the door, but casually, and didn’t seem to have put himself there strategically.

“Find anything good?” Lambert asked, setting his collection of jars down on the table by the door to look at the labels so he could shelve them in order. The shelves seemed bare, but Jaskier could tell it was only because they were meant to hold an unimaginable quantity of goods; what was here was plenty for the current population. It was all alcohols, with impossible-to-read labels in what Jaskier was realizing must mostly be Lambert’s handwriting. 

No, some of it was surely Eskel’s. None was Geralt’s. 

“There’s,” Jaskier said, “a lot here.”

“I wouldn’t drink any of it,” Lambert said, “were I you.”

“Oh,” Jaskier said, “I wasn’t planning to.”

He noted with some surprise, now that Lambert’s arms were free and his clothing visible, that he was wearing an apron not like the plain smock-style ones Eskel seemed to favor, but rather more in the cut of a woman’s, with embroidery along the hems. Moreover his shirt collar, visible over the shabby unarmored jacket he was wearing in place of his usual gambeson, was brightly embroidered with birds or flowers or something.

Lambert caught him looking, and scowled at him, but it seemed to be a habitual expression. “Well,” the Witcher said, “I don’t know what you’re looking for in here, but--”

“Oh,” Jaskier said, “I’m just nosing around. I love your shirt, by the way, can I look at the embroidery?”

Lambert’s expression was dour but with only a little attention Jaskier could read that he was really neutral, waiting-- it was like when he’d been waiting to be made fun of for the makeup, clearly. Jaskier took it as an invitation and stepped into his space, bringing his lantern a little closer to see the shine of the thread. It was cheap and cheerful rather than the sort of glitz Jaskier himself normally went into, but glitz would likely look incongruous with the rest of a Witcher’s gear. Lambert was wearing workmanlike leather trousers, after all. 

“This is more cheer than I expected in a Witcher’s aesthetic,” he said, but his tone was light and he gave Lambert a conspiratorial wink. “I appreciate not being the only one unafraid to wear colors, around here.” Greatly daring, he reached out and touched the shirt collar, enjoying the texture of the stitching-- it was a skilful bit of embroidery, done in durable stitches to hold up to laundering rather than the sort one used with silk floss to catch the light that made a jacket so hard to wash. Unusual to see that sort of work in these sorts of colors, though.

“I traded her,” Lambert said. “The seamstress. I brought her the special colorfast dyes in return for her making me some stuff out of them.” His voice was less hard-edged than usual, a bit hoarse.

“These are so bright,” Jaskier said. 

“Witchers know how to make them,” Lambert said. “Well, we did. I still have the recipes, most of ‘em, but the dye shop here, well. It’s gone. So I can’t make the quantity we used to sell.”

“Interesting,” Jaskier murmured. 

Suddenly Lambert blurted, “Are you a man or do you figure no?”

Jaskier blinked at him. “What?”

Lambert’s jaw set, clearly regretting his phrasing. He blinked, mouth twitching as he considered alternate words, and finally said, “Do you-- are you like.” He gestured vaguely, fluttering his fingers up and down to encompass all of Jaskier, apparently. “Your whole, like, presentation, and all-- are you a _man_ , or?”

The instinctive defensive reaction in Jaskier eased a little at the obvious signs that Lambert was not actually trying to be aggressive about this. “Geralt gets offended if you call him a man,” Jaskier said thoughtfully.

“Right,” Lambert said, “but he still thinks of himself as male, at least.”

“And you don’t,” Jaskier concluded, a little surprised. “And I-- ah. Well, see, I figure I’m a man, sure enough,” and Lambert’s mouth twisted a little, “but you’re right, I do very deliberately present myself in feminine ways a lot of the time, and it’s not-- an act, exactly. I mean it is very much a deliberate thing that I do, but I do it because it feels like the most authentic thing I can do in order to be myself, in this world. I’m not much fussed if people treat me… well. I don’t like it when someone bristles up into my space and demands to know exactly what I am, it’s hard to see that as friendly,” and here Jaskier patted Lambert’s embroidered chest, “but I think I understand where you’re coming from, dear.”

“I never want to make like a big production out of it,” Lambert said. “It’s not just that I don’t have the guts it’s that I don’t like it being a big deal. But I get tired about it sometimes.” And it was as clear as crystal, from his hesitant body-language, that he absolutely wasn’t intending to loom threateningly at Jaskier; he was just nervous. 

It stood to reason this wasn’t something he talked about a lot.

Jaskier smiled at him. “Well, darling,” he said, “if you ever do want to make more of a production out of it, I can recommend you a tailor or two.”

Lambert bit his lip, considering that. “I’d take your recommendation, bard.”

* * *

Jaskier presented Lambert with a folded note upon which he had written not only the names of all his favorite tailors and haberdashers, most of whom were in Oxenfurt and Novigrad, but also the names of the establishments of all sorts he’d found that tended to cater to persons of… unconventional… relationships to things like sex and gender and the like. Not all of them would particularly be friendly to a large male-looking Witcher hanging about, but Jaskier figured Lambert rather knew how the world perceived him and wouldn’t need to be reminded of that, and it would do him good just to know such things existed. 

He did make a point of underlining the ones he thought would be friendly enough to Lambert as a customer, at least. He had some experience at discerning these sorts of things, from his lengthy involvement in Geralt’s affairs. 

Lambert was in the midst of giving Ciri an alchemy lesson when Jaskier found him. Ciri was sitting on a table and had fantastical winged eyeliner, in deep black, clearly done by a more skilled hand than her own. Lambert was hunched over a burner, wearing a pair of protective goggles. 

“--flame should show blue, mostly, because if it’s yellow you’re just wasting your fucking fuel,” Lambert was saying. Jaskier had a moment to wonder if Ciri’s old tutors had used that particular expletive so much.

Not like it mattered. She had enough early deportment training that she’d have it her whole life, and it wasn’t really important to worry about it now. She was old enough to have her manners ingrained; the way she habitually stood and sat would always telegraph to the observant that she’d been raised extremely noble, no matter how many filthy verb conjugations her new tutors taught her.

At the moment she was sitting criss-cross legged and slouching, but the way she had her arms organized in idleness, her wrists held absently just so-- yeah, she’d had a deportment tutor as a toddler. Her body had been shaped into correct lines from the moment she’d had the capacity for independent movement. Sword training was going to be a breeze.

She lit up when she saw him; Lambert hadn’t noticed him yet, and this was a rare chance to sneak up on a Witcher-- it was noisy, with whatever the esoteric burner-thing Lambert was using making a soft roaring noise, and it was smelly, and he was distracted.

Jaskier put his finger to his lips and settled next to Ciri. Lambert went on explaining what to look for as he used the thing, and even turned around and addressed Ciri twice without noticing Jaskier-- apparently the goggles weren’t just decorative. 

“I’m gonna tell you a secret,” Lambert said to Ciri, glancing her way but not really looking, and waving a hand at her. “You gotta promise, this is a secret.”

“I haven’t told any of your other secrets,” Ciri said, wildly amused but doing a good job at not letting on audibly. 

Lambert took the little pot he’d been working in off the heat and set it on the table, where he had a small assemblage of items. The burner went out with a soft _whump_. “Yeah but this isn’t a _me_ secret,” he said, “this is an _us_ secret, okay? It’s about Witchers in general and you can’t tell anybody who isn’t one.”

“I would never,” Ciri said solemnly. Jaskier winked at her and she smiled but did not giggle.

“The secret ingredient in some of these potions,” Lambert said, “and something nobody else is ever gonna be able to replicate. Works as an intensifier and a stabilizer-- some of this shit starts to degrade right away, and if you don’t use the potion within a day or so it turns useless.”

“Oh, I’d imagine so,” Ciri said, interested. 

Lambert pulled out a small glass jar. It appeared to hold-- “oh ew,” Ciri said, “are those _teeth_?”-- human teeth, as far as Jaskier could tell. 

“Witcher teeth,” Lambert said. “Specifically Witcher teeth.” He pulled one out and lay it down on his cutting surface. It looked like a cracked molar. “You don’t need a lot. I keep ‘em whole and then when I need one you can dissolve it in whatever acid is compatible with your potion. This whole potion is acidic enough that I can just shave a chunk off and drop it in. You remember all about acids and bases, right?” and he glanced right up at Ciri, eyes distorted through the goggles.

“Yeah,” she said, uneasy. “Wait, but whose teeth are those?”

“I usually use my own,” Lambert said, and he was absorbed in what he was doing again, using a tiny saw blade to hack a chunk off the broken tooth. “Also it’s easier to do this in a quantity where you don’t have to subdivide the tooth, right, so either pre-dissolve it in one of the acidic ingredients you use in potions, or make a bigger batch, but listen this is for teaching purposes. At the moment, though, I’m out of my own teeth, and Coen broke one of his molars the other day so he was good enough to give it to me. So this is, technically, a Griffin Witcher tooth, and that could matter for something because he’s got slightly different mutations and all, but definitely not for this.”

“You use your own teeth,” Ciri said, horrified.

“Oh,” Lambert said, glancing up, “but they grow back, don’t worry about it.”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Jaskier said, entirely forgetting that he was supposed to be keeping quiet to see how long he could go without Lambert noticing him.

Lambert noticed him, and pulled his goggles off and stood up, and his expression was wide-eyed with horror. “Fuck,” he said.

“What the fuck,” Jaskier said again, as all of it settled into place. “Fuck, of _course_ you can’t go telling people that, oh my sweet _Goddess_.”

“Why can’t you tell people?” Ciri asked, and oh dear, she had the traumatized child’s innate ability to immediately recognize when people were upset about something; she shrank back from both of them.

“It’s a _secret_ ,” Lambert said, and his expression had gone pleading, which was good because Jaskier for an instant had worried the Witcher would kill him for it, but that clearly hadn’t even crossed Lambert’s mind. Yet.

“Dear heart,” Jaskier said to Ciri, “if alchemists or mages knew that Witchers not only had teeth that were a valuable alchemical ingredient, but also that they could regrow them, why-- well, what do you think would happen?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

“You do,” Jaskier said, gently. “Think about it. When something is useful like that, it’s worth money. When it’s worth money, people will do things to get it. As it is people kill Witchers for flimsy reasons; if they knew they could harvest valuable ingredients from them, it would be worse. And how much worse even than that would it be, do you think, if an unscrupulous person realized the teeth would grow back? If they could get a single Witcher as a prisoner and keep him alive, they could periodically harvest them to sell. And what would they have to do to keep a Witcher tame? Terrible things, Ciri.” He’d been ticking each of his points off on his fingers, and at the last, he gestured widely enough that he almost fell off the table.

“You can’t tell _anybody_ ,” Lambert said, and there, his desperation had tipped over and he sounded angry now. 

“I won’t,” Jaskier said, turning to him directly. “I wouldn’t. I won’t. I wouldn’t even allude to it. Oh my goodness. I don’t-- there’s not even anything in this world that I take seriously enough to swear an oath on, to convey how serious I am about this.”

“How fucking long have you been sitting there?” Lambert demanded.

“A while, actually,” Jaskier said. “I came to give you a list of tailors and such. But you should keep on with your alchemizing, don’t let me distract you.”

“Tailors and,” Lambert said blankly, and then his eyebrows went up. “Oh.”

“And I underlined the ones that I think would be likely to actually sell to you without a fuss, if you know what I mean,” Jaskier said. He held up the little folded piece of paper, and then set it down on the table. “I’ll leave it here for now. But keep on with your lesson, it’s fascinating.”

“Hm,” Lambert said. “Yeah, okay. Thanks.” He hesitated a moment longer, then went back to his tooth fragment, and dropped it into the pan and stirred. 

The lesson continued, Jaskier sat and watched, and after a bit they were done, and as Ciri wrote out the notes he’d set for her, Lambert came and stood next to Jaskier, and picked up the little piece of paper. 

“Thanks for this,” he said, looking it over.

He was wearing a battered, stained leather gambeson, but underneath it, again, his shirt had bright embroidery at the neck. He was clearly a fluent reader, but there was something in his demeanor that suggested he’d come late to it, some endearingly deliberate air to it. His deportment suggested he’d been born and raised a peasant, but mostly his body language was reminiscent of Geralt’s, his stance that of someone who’d made a long study of the arts of the sword, and none at all of dance. 

“Of course,” Jaskier said.

“Before you go,” Lambert said, “remind me, and I can give you some dyes to bribe your tailors with. As a thanks. Since nobody knows how to make them anymore but me.”

“Oh,” Jaskier said, “I appreciate that, thank you Lambert, but that reminds me, obviously your attempts to teach Ciri makeup are hampered by not having ingredients. I have some cosmetics with me, Triss had mentioned something of it to Yennefer and I heard just enough that I thought to bring some along.”

“Oh, fantastic,” Lambert said.

Ciri looked up hopefully from her writing. “Can we do that next?”

“Why not,” Lambert said. “Finish up first, kiddo.”

Jaskier hopped off the table. “Let me go get my things,” he said. “Do you want to try the latest Novigrad style?”

“I do,” Ciri said.

“This sounds dangerous,” Lambert said. “I’m in.”

**Author's Note:**

> HA HA HA HAAAA I've been writing little dribs and drabs of this for months and I was working on something else to keep myself distracted from *gestures broadly* all of this, and I switched over to this right this morning and AS I wrote the FINAL sentence, thinking "ah this will be a good thing to post to help keep people's minds off the stress of current events" my dude called out from the other room "CNN called the election!" and like. Well, wow. Great timing, me!  
> Well, here this is, when the dust settles of these wild times.


End file.
